Nasdaq Achieves Best-Ever Chartis RiskTech100 Result, Strengthening Its Position in Risk Technology
Nasdaq has achieved its strongest result to date in the widely followed Chartis RiskTech100 rankings, rising to second place overall in the 2027 edition from fifth place the previous year and securing 14 category awards, compared with five in the prior ranking.
The recognition reflects years of investment in technology, product development, acquisitions, integration, and innovation as Nasdaq continues to build a more connected financial technology portfolio. The company’s strategy has increasingly focused on bringing together capabilities across risk management, financial crime prevention, regulatory reporting, trade surveillance, governance, and other critical financial workflows.
Nasdaq said the latest recognition represents more than an improvement in an industry ranking. According to company leadership, it demonstrates the progress made in transforming independently developed and acquired businesses into a more connected platform designed to help financial institutions manage increasingly complex operational, regulatory, and market challenges.
The technology foundation supporting this strategy includes cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technology, data management, modern application programming interfaces, and connectivity solutions. Together, these technologies are intended to help financial institutions modernize critical processes while maintaining resilience, transparency, governance, and control.
A Portfolio Built Around Changing Financial Markets
The latest Chartis recognition comes at a time when financial institutions are facing significant changes across technology, regulation, market infrastructure, and customer expectations.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence is changing how financial organizations approach automation, decision-making, compliance, and risk management. At the same time, digital assets and other forms of digital financial infrastructure are increasingly interacting with established financial markets.
Regulatory expectations are also evolving, while changing market structures are creating new requirements for financial institutions and market participants. Organizations are therefore being asked to make important technology and business decisions even when the future operating environment remains uncertain.
Against this backdrop, technology providers are increasingly expected to offer more than individual software functions. Financial institutions need solutions that can operate across critical workflows while supporting the resilience, governance, transparency, and controls required in highly regulated environments.
Nasdaq’s latest Chartis result reflects this broader approach to its technology portfolio.
Recognition Across Multiple Categories
The Chartis RiskTech100 evaluates leading providers across the global risk technology market. Nasdaq’s 14 category awards in the 2027 ranking span several areas of its technology portfolio.
At the company level, Nasdaq received recognition for Customer Satisfaction and Market Presence.
Its markets and infrastructure capabilities were recognized across Trading and Capital Markets, Mid-Tier Banking, Securities, Market Infrastructure, and Clearing House Risk.
The company also received awards across financial crime, compliance, and controls, including AML for Regional Banks, Financial Crime Risk Management, Regulatory Reporting, Trade Surveillance, and Managed Services for Financial Crime.
Technology and risk analytics represented another area of recognition, with Nasdaq receiving awards for AI and Technology Innovation and Real-Time Risk Management.
The breadth of these awards highlights Nasdaq’s strategy of connecting capabilities across multiple areas rather than focusing exclusively on a single risk technology category.
Valerie Bannert-Thurner, Executive Vice President of Nasdaq’s Financial Technology division, said the recognition reflects years of work to develop and integrate the company’s financial technology capabilities.
It’s a really good testament to a lot of hard work that has gone into building and uniting the FinTech division,” Bannert-Thurner said.
Nasdaq has been active in financial technology for almost two decades and has combined organic development with acquisitions and integrations, including Verafin, Calypso, and AxiomSL.
Bannert-Thurner said the latest awards therefore recognize not only individual products but the broader platform created by bringing these capabilities together.
She also emphasized the contribution of Nasdaq employees across the organization.
This has been so much effort from the thousands of Nasdaq employees working in tech-focused roles across the organization,” she said.
Three Forces Reshaping Financial Technology
According to Bannert-Thurner, three major trends are increasingly influencing the technology requirements of Nasdaq’s clients: agentic transformation, digitization, and the development of always-on markets.
The first is the growing adoption of agentic technology across financial services.
Financial institutions are exploring how AI agents can automate processes, support employees, improve investigations, and increase operational efficiency. Bannert-Thurner described clients as being on a journey toward becoming more “agentic-native” organizations.
This development is also changing the role technology providers play with their customers. Rather than simply supplying individual software features, providers are increasingly expected to help institutions achieve measurable business outcomes and navigate technological transformation.
For Nasdaq, this means supporting financial institutions as they determine where agentic capabilities can be introduced while maintaining appropriate governance and controls.
Digital Infrastructure Continues to Evolve
The second major force is digitization and the convergence of digital financial infrastructure with established financial markets.
Bannert-Thurner described the emerging environment as neither a complete move toward crypto-based infrastructure nor a continuation of traditional systems without change. Instead, she said, a new financial ecosystem is developing.
One example is digital collateral mobilization, where digital technologies can support the movement and management of collateral within financial markets.
As financial infrastructure becomes increasingly digital, technology providers must ensure that new capabilities can operate alongside existing systems while meeting the operational and regulatory requirements of financial institutions.
The Growth of Always-On Markets
The third major trend is the movement toward increasingly continuous financial markets.
Nasdaq’s 23/5 initiative, which is designed to enable U.S. equities trading for 23 hours a day, five days a week, illustrates the infrastructure implications of this shift.
Bannert-Thurner said the development could provide greater access to U.S. liquidity for investors around the world, but also creates significant operational and risk-management requirements for market participants.
Extending trading hours may appear to be a relatively straightforward change from the perspective of market participants. However, the underlying infrastructure implications can be extensive.
Longer operating hours affect areas such as risk management, technology operations, staffing, liquidity, settlement processes, and business continuity.
As a result, the transition toward more continuously available markets requires financial institutions and technology providers to reconsider how critical systems operate.
Trust Remains Central to Technology Adoption
Nasdaq’s Financial Technology business serves more than 3,800 clients globally, giving the company extensive exposure to the technology and operational requirements of financial institutions.
Bannert-Thurner said long-standing client relationships have played an important role in shaping Nasdaq’s technology roadmap.
She argued that trust is particularly important as financial institutions adopt emerging technologies such as AI.
Trust isn’t something you can buy; it’s something you earn, and I believe we’ve been working for it for many years,” she said.
For highly regulated organizations, the adoption of AI involves more than determining whether a technology can improve efficiency. Institutions also need to understand how new systems operate, how decisions can be governed, and how organizations can maintain transparency and control.
This is particularly important as financial institutions explore agentic AI, where software can potentially perform increasingly complex tasks with a greater degree of autonomy.
Nasdaq’s approach is therefore centered on applying emerging technologies within environments where resilience, governance, transparency, and accountability remain essential.
Expanding AI Across Governance and Compliance
The company’s technology strategy also extends beyond traditional financial risk management.
Nasdaq Boardvantage®, its board portal software, and Nasdaq Lens™, an AI-native platform designed for finance, legal, sustainability, and risk teams, contributed to the company’s broader portfolio recognition.
Gabriella Halasz-Clarke, VP of Governance Solutions at Nasdaq, said the governance environment has changed substantially over the past decade.
Organizations now face a combination of increasing regulatory requirements, cybersecurity concerns, rapid AI adoption, and greater expectations for transparency and accountability.
These pressures are encouraging organizations to rethink how boards, executives, legal teams, finance departments, and risk professionals access and manage information.
Nasdaq’s technology strategy is increasingly focused on connecting these functions rather than treating them as isolated processes.
Nasdaq Lens reflects this direction by using AI to help teams work through complex regulatory, compliance, disclosure, and related questions more efficiently. The objective is not simply to introduce AI into existing workflows, but to help users identify relevant information, accelerate analysis, and make decisions with greater confidence in the underlying data.
Moving From Systems of Record to Platforms of Action
Looking ahead, Nasdaq Financial Technology is seeking to build on its established position in mission-critical environments while expanding its role in helping customers take action.
Bannert-Thurner pointed to Nasdaq Verafin’s Agentic AI workforce as an example of how this strategy is already being implemented. The technology is designed to help financial institutions automate aspects of fraud and anti-money laundering workflows, accelerate investigations, and support financial crime teams.
This represents a broader shift in Nasdaq’s technology vision.
Our North Star is evolving from being a system of record, mission-critical and core to the operations of a bank, exchange, or broker-dealer toward being a platform of action,” Bannert-Thurner said.
The distinction is significant. Systems of record provide the foundational infrastructure organizations rely on to manage essential information and processes. Platforms of action can build on that foundation by helping users analyze information, automate tasks, and respond to emerging situations.
Nasdaq sees agentic capabilities as an important component of that evolution, allowing its software portfolio to support a broader range of activities and business outcomes.
Building Infrastructure for the Next Stage of Finance
Nasdaq’s 2027 Chartis RiskTech100 performance reflects a broader transformation of its Financial Technology business. The company has spent years combining organic innovation with acquisitions and technology investments to create a more connected portfolio spanning risk, compliance, financial crime, market infrastructure, governance, and analytics.
The financial services industry is simultaneously undergoing several major changes. AI is creating new opportunities for automation and decision support, digital technologies are reshaping financial infrastructure, and market participants are adapting to longer and increasingly continuous operating environments.
For financial institutions, these developments create opportunities but also introduce new requirements around governance, resilience, security, transparency, and risk management.
Nasdaq’s strategy is to address these needs by combining technology with financial industry expertise and long-standing relationships with institutions operating in mission-critical environments.
The company’s latest Chartis recognition provides external acknowledgement of the breadth of that portfolio, while its leadership continues to emphasize the longer-term objective: helping financial institutions modernize critical operations, respond to changing market conditions, and use emerging technologies while maintaining the controls and confidence required to operate in highly regulated markets.
As AI, digitization, and evolving market structures continue to reshape financial services, Nasdaq is positioning its technology portfolio around a more connected model designed to help clients move from managing information and risk toward taking informed, technology-enabled action.
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